An Integration Programme is a +/- 4-week intensive training course
offered to candidate freelance
interpreters who narrowly fail the
freelance accreditation test, or to
interpreters who have just passed
their final interpreting exams, in
order to help them pass the
accreditation test at the end of the
programme.

These courses are organised for
"priority languages", which have a
shortage of interpreters, and are
determined on an annual basis.

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http://meu-strasbourg.org/ - Model European Union Strasbourg, a one-week EU simulation at the premises of the European Parliament. Not exactly an internship (and it is interpreting students, not new graduates, who are eligible) but I think it might be worth mentioning here.

One remark regarding the internship at the Court of Justice: I think that the "requires strong French" comment is a bit misleading and might sound discouraging for some readers.

In 2013 you still could read on MEU's website that studying conference interpreting wasn't a
requirement to be eligible to sit in the booth and try to interpret.

I had no idea, that's terribly unfortunate and just unprofessional. I've just had a look at the website, and it is indeed written there that "The role of interpreters is primarily meant for students of Translation studies but this is not a prerequisite" (and 'translation studies'?!).

I took part in MEU 2012. As far as the financial aspect is concerned, my university was among those that agreed to participate in costs. I don't think it was that unfair, considering that there were clearly more Polish interpreters than needed. On the other hand, the interpreters that are actually needed (i.e. 2-3 per booth) should be exempt from the participation fee.

The admission procedure seemed fair and detailed enough (at least back then), there were surely differences in the interpreting skills of the participants but I did not have negative impressions (that said, I obviously cannot comment on the interpreting performance in the languages I don't speak).

However, there were pretty significant shortcomings as far as basic organisational matters are concerned (but I used to coordinate international youth and student exchange projects so I might be more critical than many). Furthermore, the role-specific workshop for interpreters wasn't well-organized either.

Still, it was a really amazing interpreting experience and one that taught me a lot, certainly more than study visits to Brussels (with dummy booth practice) - which is why I would recommend interpreting students to take part in this project (despite all its drawbacks) or to find a similar one (I am not sure if there is another opportunity of this kind with Polish, though).

By the way, I've noticed in your linkedin.com profile that you coordinated interpretation at GIMUN. May I ask what the recruitment procedure was like and whether the interpreters had to pay for participation or not?

MEU: If they are taking more students per booth than they need, where do these 300€ per capita go? What costs are related to the presence of extra interpreters? The room is already there, I don't believe the NGO has to rent the premises. So what are the 300€ for? Giving access to the booths? That's a bit blunt. There is no other NGO or organisation selling spots in the booth to cover for other expenses. Plus, the wording suggests that you buy yourself a spot in an active booth. Meaning that people who don't have the financial means (but might be doing a better job) will be in a dummy booth? How does that serve the client regarding quality of service?

it was a really amazing interpreting experience and one that taught me a lot ... which is why I would recommend interpreting students to take part in this project (despite all its drawbacks)

And it teaches clients that they can get as many inexperienced people to work for them for free as they want. They can even make them pay. Settling for this kind of shady deal (Caux, MEU, et al.) is damaging our reputation and sending a very bad message about how desperate some people are to get unmonitored practice (which doesn't improve your technique a bit, but students tend to ignore that).

GIMUN: This year we selected 35 students, giving priority to schools who'd send along teachers, since I'm no big fan of practice without peer monitoring and 2013 had shown that 3 trainers were too little. So this year we had a ratio of 1 trainer for 4 students, with a total of 9 trainers: 5 teachers (of which 2 CI course directors), 2 EU freelancers, 1 UN freelancer & 1 NATO staff (two of this lot being also course directors at CCIC). We'll keep a similar format for 2015.

Students don't pay any fees. Rather than asking extra students to pay 300€ for having access to the booth, the organizer this year financed lunch and social events (e.g. drinks, dinners) for 22 surplus people (while the core team could be as little as 18 people).

I agree that the interpreters should have all their costs reimbursed and that the idea of financial contributions paid by universities is rather unfortunate.

It should be noted though that the participation fee (the regular one, I am not talking about the extra money paid by universities) covered board and accommodation. There was also a 'social fund' for travel cost reimbursement, and some of my friends got reimbursed for that.

No difference was made between 'regular' and 'extra' interpreters, no spots in active booths were bought (as of 2012). On the contrary, it was only the 'oversized' language teams that worked in a dummy booth from time to time (with a fair split here).

In my opinion, MEU is/was quite different from Caux: from what I know, the organizers were volunteers and the whole initiative was strictly non-profit. Furthermore, it was clearly a mock conference, a kind of a 'students for students' event which was organized earlier without interpreters, as all participants were required to know English anyway.

One thing that I found questionable, though, was the size of the organizing team, not at all proportional to the size of the event. You really don't need that many people to organize an event for ca. 200 participants, and even though not all the people involved in the organizational work took part in the event, I was wondering if it wasn't the number of organizers that added a lot to the total costs of MEU. (By the way, how demotivating it must to be involved in the preparation work of an event in which you won't participate later on! That's some seriously bad management.)

I honestly think that this unmonitored practice was useful for me: for instance, I learned a lot about preparation and team work. Obviously this could be achieved by other means, too (such as mock conferences organized at the interpreting school - I wish we had had more of those!).

That said, GIMUN sounds amazing (I envy you :)) and this is how things should be done, including the feedback of trainers (that's what I enjoyed most about the internship at the Court of Justice - after all, it's not about sitting in the booth, it's the possibility to get feedback, advice and support from experienced colleagues that truly matters).

Sorry for being so terribly chaotic today. I understand your arguments and I absolutely agree we should not damage the reputation of our profession. I just can't help that MEU was a good and useful experience for me (which is even kind of ironic, as I remember I was pretty annoyed with organizational shortcomings of the event and I, quite bluntly, shared my opinions with the organizers).

This isn't necessarily specifically related to interpreting. However, I'm using the scholarship to do research on conflict zone interpretation at ETI in Geneva.

The scholarship is called thinkSwiss. It is arranged by the Swiss government to get foreign students (potentially only students in the US and Canada) grants and scholarships to study and do research in Switzerland.
www.thinkswiss.org